7 Bad Habits You Must Give Up In Order To Be A Good Leader

It pays to be aware of your own habits, despite their tendency to slip by unnoticed. Giving up bad habits will improve your leadership and productivity. In this post, I shared with you 7 bad habits you must give up in order to be a good leader.

Professionals often assume that becoming a leader requires adding new skills or habits to your arsenal. While this can help, doing the opposite can be just as effective. Giving up simple things and habits is crucial if you want to be a good leader. Simply put, leadership requires great sacrifice.

Success isn’t always about dominating the landscape. Sometimes, to be successful, you have to be prepared to give up some counterproductive behaviors that are holding your entire organization back. Most of the time, these are all old habits and old habits are often the hardest to break.

As an entrepreneur, success is not negotiable. Unfortunately, despite your knowledge, ambition, and talent there are a few disastrous personality quirks that can hold you back from realizing your full potential. Here are 7 bad habits you must give up in order to be a good leader:

1. Micromanaging

The opposite of delegating, micro-managing wears people down, wastes your time and turns you into a petty tyrant. If this is a habit you suffer from, it might mean that you don’t trust your team to get things done on their own. If you have a good reason to feel that way, maybe it’s time to trim some fat. On the other hand, your micro-managing may just be a nervous habit. If that’s the case, you need to work on it before you drive everyone else away.

2. Being Reactive Instead of Being Proactive 

When you only work reactively, you’re only acting upon things once they happen. The key is to deal with things long before they even start flying your way. You need to foresee trouble and find ways to deal with it long before it spirals out of control. If you’re not proactive, you’re very easy to throw off balance and a prime target for your competition. Be ready for problems before they happen. Good leaders mitigate disaster long before it happens.

3. Indecisiveness

As a leader, you’re under a lot of pressure to make the right decisions that drive your business forward. However, there’s something worse than making the wrong decision, which is making no decision at all. If you have a list of to-do items that you’re postponing simply because you aren’t yet sure what to do with them, you might have a problem with indecisiveness. This inability to commit to decisions leads to a halt in productivity for your entire business. Commit to decisions, even if you’re not 100 percent sure of the outcome. A bad decision is still better than no decision.

4. Not Doing What You Say You Will

Leading a startup or a new company is exciting and there are a lot of different offers and opportunities that will come your way. But until you are sure of something, be cautious about announcing it to the company. It’s understandable that with new companies, things will change, but the more you can stay true to your word and correctly set expectations, the more credibility you will have with your employees. Do what you say and say what you mean. Having credibility with your staff not only boosts morale, but it will also increase overall productivity and camaraderie.

5. Lack Of Humility

The person who acts as though they can do it all and are the only one who can do it right is unlikely to rise to be a great leader. There is a fine line between confidence and cockiness. Arrogance is never good for leadership, but confidence is a necessity. Find the right balance between the two and you can be a very successful leader.

6. Failure to Inspire And Motivate Others

The number one most devaluing quality of ineffective leaders is their inability to motivate their team. Most leaders know how to push to get results, but very few understand how to pull. Leaders with this bad habit of only pushing and not pulling have been described as autocratic and micro managers. Others were described as unenthusiastic and passive. Energizing people and inspiring them to peak levels of performance is the most challenging struggle for many ineffective leaders.

7. Being Too Risk Averse

Nothing worthwhile happens without either risk or commitment. You need to know when one is going to work better than the other. If you’re afraid of risk, you may try to compensate it by committing yourself to the regular, diligent effort. Obviously, there are greater vices in the grand scheme of things. However, failing to recognize those moments when the value of a given risk is optimal can make you non-competitive in your industry.

Conclusion

It pays to be aware of your own habits, despite their tendency to slip by unnoticed. Giving up bad habits will improve your leadership and productivity. In this post, I shared with you 7 bad habits you must give up in order to be a good leader.